"She’s wielding a glowing laser pointer like a wand, and the whole team are wearing academic gowns that look like splendid flapping black robes. They’re bending rays of coloured light and casually vanishing solid shapes in liquids. Forget today's premiere of Harry Potter. Right now these people are the closest things to true wizards in the whole of London."

"Perhaps this has the beginnings of a wonderful story: an accidental discovery of a new species leads to solutions for the most pressing energy problems facing mankind today. Our salvation was found in the rainforest’s biodiversity."Future Still Green for Biofuels?

"It was the stuff you had to scrub out of fish tanks, and that you thought might kill you if you went swimming in lakes filled with the blue-green variety. It was around and irreversibly changing the Earth’s atmosphere millions of years ago. Algae."